At first, deciding about television was a simple matter of thoughtful grading. A slow matter, too, as I had been watching television for all these days and never thought of grading it.
I planned to do this test for a few days, since I knew the results of my scores before I began. I knew that my spirit would never be lifted by news programs, by all but a few well-written and photographed programs. If my grades were deep in Minus Territory, why was I wasting my spirit on television? Wouldn’t Quiet be a better background for my life, than some vast Minus television score?
Better I use a video screen to see videos, knowing I have to choose them first, and they’ll matter to me, and most likely be positive.
How I grade: Every news event in a half-hour newscast, would earn a grade from me, its viewer. There may be fifty events or more: a newswriter’s few sentences about what she feels is newsworthy, that’s one event; some sentences she finds tragic is another; that she finds funny is another; a story about a person; about nature; about entertainment; about the weather; a commercial: each scrap of video is an event.
Scores:
If my spirit is lifted by what I’ve seen..................... Plus 1
If my spirit is unaffected..................................... Zero (0)
If my spirit is dragged down by this..................... Minus 1
I’ll note these numbers on a piece of paper, then add them up to get a Plus (Pleasure for my spirit), a Nothing for it, or a Minus (Empty place where my spirit used to be).
Then before I began my grading began, something happened that confirmed my grades. The World Trade Towers collapsed.
It took me a few seconds to realize that the world in the United States would be changed. I knew that if I kept the television set, that I would see the first scenes of the collapse thousands and thousands of times. That the news would be full of it, there would be rings of death and war rippling out from Ground Zero.
Years of controversy, years of lies, efforts to find truth, efforts to crush new evidence of the event. I didn’t think of the number of young mortals of our military who would die, and the number of whatever we decided would be the population of Theirs to die. I didn’t think of the money that would be earned for the companies who manufactured the tools of war. I didn’t think what a great way to earn billions of dollars for war denominated companies! I could have thought about that, but I didn’t.
Instead, I put the television set into the back of the pickup truck and left it at the recycling center.
My Television Set Today: My Laptop Computer
Would I have liked some of the programs I never saw? Probably. I didn’t feel sad for not seeing them, I just didn’t know they were on the invisible channels for my non-existent television screen.
Only recently have I received broadcasts, usually about food and exercise from a transmitter you’ve seen before: my dog.
Aside from this, gradually, the Internet gave a small part of the world that I half-way cared about. I heard about the tsunami, about the Japanese nuclear meltdown, about the Malaysian airliner on the web. Did I do anything about these events? No.
My world became local. The little towns nearby continued through all the crises with not even a tremble from the world’s earthquakes. I got to know the forest nearby, noticed when the sun rose and set, when the moon turned about the earth. I wrote about a world much more important to me than the television reports.
I lifted my days on some events that changed me, but they were never on the channels. I flew off-airways in small aircraft. I had a crash that taught me that no matter what happens in space-time, nobody dies. Horrors and tragedies in daily life here on Earth, they don’t much matter to our friends in the afterlife, those worlds where we live for countless multi millions of what we would call years. As mortals, we can decide whether any event is a tragedy or a delight or both: a belief of ours.
Is This Lifting My Spirit?
I’ve changed my consciousness from television to the Internet and to books and personal life.
I’ve discovered that Lockie, my Shetland Sheepdog, is capable of finding a small half of a candy bar that was hidden behind a computer on a table that would not support his weight without collapsing . . . it was not possible for him to have retrieved that candy bar. But he did. I was not aware he had left the kitchen when he disappeared to make that remarkable retrieval.
Is that story ever going to be on television? I hope not. Has my spirit been lifted from the books I’ve read? Balloon-like has it lifted. Lots of books on death and dying, lots of computer information about crop circles, aliens, events that may even touch you when I put them on the website, offered for your interest, from mine.
How do I think about politics? I don’t think about politics. At all. If at some day politics touches my world, decides that I am a loss to their world, that’s fine. Destroy writers, political leaders may say, extinguish my belief in life as a mortal? Certainly, if they wish. Destroying our bodies or not, by one or by millions, there’s no person or event who has the power to kill me or you or any expression of life (I learned that from my airplane crash).
Playing with Our Beliefs
There are thousands of, part of me says millions of, television news stories I’ve never seen. I don’t know about murders, about all sorts of crime, about terrible accidents, about natural events that kill and displace humans. Senseless political events that kill so many others, I’ve never heard of them. Does it hurt me, that I haven’t been told about them, and so many others that never made it into the news? No. If I had a chance to go back through the last ten years and learn about them, would I do it? Nope.
This world, just like others, like planets, like heavens everywhere, is a belief for those of us who accept them. We play with our beliefs, shift them, change them, dance with space-times till they cannot teach us more, and then we fly into dimensions where we can learn other things that we’ve never heard about.
All these beliefs of mine, I didn’t have them in my daily consciousness when I started this lifetime. Gradually gradually, year after year, a web of light spun around me as they do for most everyone. Ideas that made sense to me, they stayed. They fit like puzzle pieces into the other pieces which had stayed, too. Right now I’m learning a difficult lesson — that loneliness is a self-imposed belief. That we have others who we’ve cared for and who care for us, though perhaps not one of them has a body in space-time.
Can’t some of them be still wearing a body? Of course they can. I think I’ve been learning that when we stop trying to meet one other who will change our life, it will happen by itself.
Do I know that’s true, body or not? Yes. And that it will be a surprise? Without question.
Do I enjoy it? Not a bit. Yet again, slowly slowly, I’m learning how to touch a loved one with no body at all. How to let a spirit visit my mind. Gradually I’m learning a lesson we’ve had time and again – how to live in a spiritual world even while we believe in space and time for our lessons. Every lifetime we decide, regardless of others, regardless even in this age of television, who controls the adventures of our lives.
How much patience, how much care we pour, into our education!
Subtitles by InnerSelf
©2015 by Richard Bach.
Reprinted with permission of the author.
Article Source
Part-Time Angels: and 75 Others
by Richard Bach.
Click here for more info and/or to order this book.
About the Author
A former USAF pilot, gypsy barnstormer and airplane mechanic, Richard Bach is the author of Jonathan Livingston Seagull, Illusions, One, The Bridge Across Forever, and numerous other books. Most of his books have been semi-autobiographical, using actual or fictionalized events from his life to illustrate his philosophy. In 1970, Jonathan Livingston Seagull broke all hardcover sales records since Gone with the Wind. It sold more than 1,000,000 copies in 1972 alone. A second book, Illusions: The Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah, was published in 1977. Visit Richard's website at www.richardbach.com
